'A DAY LIKE NO OTHER'.

Byline: Susan Palmer The Register-Guard

Edgar Peara can still picture the men in the landing craft with him, 35 soldiers shoulder to shoulder in a tiny bobbing boat - one of hundreds - heading toward the beaches of Normandy, France.

It was D-Day, June 6, 1944.

"I saw some men vomiting with fear; some men, their palms were wet with perspiration and they were wiping them on their combat jackets. Another man I could see would light a cigarette, take a puff, then throw it overboard and light another."

Peara, now 83, was a member of the Army's 1st Engineer Amphibious Brigade - the troops responsible for clearing the beaches of mines, barbed wire and other impediments so soldiers could get ashore to fight.

World War II represents a time beyond recall for most of us. The men and women who lived it are dying now, our grandparents and great-grandparents. They still remember what they were doing when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and dragged the United States into war. And they know how the fate of World War II balanced precariously on the success of Operation Overlord, the code name for the invasion that began 60 years ago today.

Caught up in the Iraq war with its daily death toll, alarming revelations and confusing political shifts, many of us will let the D-Day anniversary slip by without notice.

But the veterans haven't forgotten. They don't need reminders of the price the Allies paid to secure the Normandy beaches and turn the tide of war.

"I still mourn for the people I saw mutilated," said Dennis McLarin, now 84 but back then a U.S. Coast Guard machinist's mate stationed on the USS Bayfield. "I'm sure I'll take it with me to my grave."

McLarin has written down his war experiences in a memoir he self-published this month. And Peara is one of many veterans interviewed in a six-hour local documentary on D-Day that airs today on television.

Those 24 hours represented a pivotal point in World War II. It was the day that American, British, Canadian and other Allied troops took the battle back to the European continent full throttle. Four years earlier, the Germans had conquered France and pushed the British into the sea at Dunkirk. The Allies believed winning the war required a successful June invasion. For them it was do or die.

Today it's hard to imagine the scale of the endeavor.

The Germans had heavily fortified the French coast across the channel from England, with thousands of concrete bunkers. The beaches and shore waters were strewn with mines, barbed wire and obstacles, and thousands of soldiers barred the way.

In Britain, the Allies had amassed the largest armada in world history. The numbers are staggering: 6,000 ships, 11,000 aircraft, 150,000 men.

Long before the ships left their harbors, the Allies had already paid a blood fee for the ensuing battle. In the two months before the invasion, 12,000 pilots had been killed on bombing runs meant to cut German supply lines and destroy strategic bridges.

Six weeks before D-Day, almost 800 men died when German torpedo boats attacked transport ships engaged in a practice invasion run off the coast of Britain. That's more men lost in a single night than in the first year of the Iraq war.

The armada began pulling out of harbors around midnight June 5, headed for five beaches along a 15-mile stretch of French coastline.

"It was a day like no other," McLarin said. "We were moving out of Plymouth Harbor, England, and it took on a sort of circus atmosphere, not a happy thing but adrenaline was running high."

As the ships slipped out of port, the air above them rumbled as thousands of airplanes ferried paratroopers who would be jumping behind the German lines.

McLarin and Peara, both raised in Illinois and now retired in Eugene, didn't know each other, but the two were headed for the same place - Utah Beach, the farthest west of Normandy's five beaches. McLarin was aboard the flagship carrying Adm. Don P. Moon, who would later commit suicide, and Peara on an LSI, an infantry landing ship that held between 200 and 300 men.

"I was at the bow because I was interested in seeing what was ahead of us," Peara said.

The Allies had targeted Normandy's beaches but bluffed the Germans into thinking the main thrust of the assault would come farther north at Calais. All along the coast, bombers and ship artilleries hammered the German emplacements relentlessly.

When ships came into position off Utah Beach, men began loading into the landing craft for the ride to shore and to battle.

The 1998 movie "Saving Private Ryan" depicted the slaughter of Americans landing at Omaha Beach. Artillery shells rained down on soldiers already being cut apart by machine gun fire. Whole companies of men were lost within minutes of landing.

That wasn't the case at Utah Beach, Peara said. There, the barrage of Allied fire had driven the defending Austrian troops to retreat. While artillery shells bombarded the Americans, soldiers were able to keep and hold positions. Peara's job was to set up a battalion command post on the beach. He established it in a shell-blasted sandy crater.

"I could see that operations for us were going satisfactorily. The sky was overcast, but the Luftwaffe (German air force) were not bombing or strafing us," he said.

Meanwhile, McLarin piloted a landing craft on one trip to bring soldiers to the beach from the Bayfield. He then returned to the ship where he spent the day repairing boat propellers damaged in the assault.

A medical aid station was set up in part of the ship's dining area. "You'd go in there for coffee and then you'd want to go right back up on deck," he said.

The soldiers who landed at Utah had a good day, penetrating five or six miles into France, Peara said. Nevertheless, close to 200 men died there.

Peara had his own close call. The battalion aid station on the beach was under artillery fire. He scouted inland looking for a safer place to move the injured and the two doctors treating them, and found an abandoned German bunker that hadn't been booby-trapped.

But he came under artillery fire. "It blew my helmet off, but I was all right," he said.

The Normandy invasion was Peara's fourth. He had already landed at North Africa, Tunisia, Sicily and Italy. By the time D-Day rolled around, he had learned to control his fear.

The night before the North Africa invasion, "I was terribly afraid," he said. But he tried to conjure up a sense of safety and security, something to hold onto no matter what happened around him. "I wanted to capture that feeling and send it forward, keep fear out of my mind," he said. It took hours for him to gain

CAPTION(S):

Edgar Peara, 83, still fits into his uniform 60 years after Allied forces stormed the beaches of Normandy during World War II. Peara set up a battalion command post at Utah Beach. INSIDE France: President Bush marks D-Day amid praise for American sacrifices / A3 Commentary: President Eisenhower prepared for the possibility that D-Day would not succeed / F1 Chris Pietsch / The Register-Guard Dennis McLarin, 84, keeps his medals pinned to a jacket for commemorative occasions. McLarin piloted a landing craft to bring soldiers from the USS Bayfield to Utah Beach.